On June 23, 2016, I came to the sad realization that most living, breathing American coffee drinkers in New York City don't understand what the f*** a coffee refill is; do not understand what it's premised on; do not see the need, do not see the business rationale, do not comprehend the implicit social covenant that the concept stems from -- cannot manage to wrap their thoughts around the idea of a theoretically bottomless cup of coffee. I know that June 23 was the date because I wrote it down. When I did, I recalled a much earlier incident in July 2006, which is when I first became aware of the rank ignorance around the topic of coffee refills, at least here in New York City. Let me try to explain how the decline of coffee refills is connected to gentrification, and something I call artisanal everything.
People Who Love Coffee Refills
If you are like me, and are outraged by even the possibility of the decline of the coffee refill, I would venture a guess that you are the type of person who scores very high on this assessment. In other words, it's highly likely that one or more of the following things are true of you:
You live in or grew up in a flyover state/region
You currently or used to drive a forklift and/or address(ed) your manager as your supervisor or boss and/or use(d) a punch card to log the hours of your work
You cash(ed) a paycheck and/or commonly visit(ed) a check cashing service to conduct your affairs
You unironically think that Vin Diesel, Wesley Snipes, or Steven Seagal make great movies
Your idea of a fancy dinner out is/was Applebee's or Red Lobster or Long John Silver's
You can identify military rankings on uniforms
You are an immigrant or the child of an immigrant
Unlimited Coffee Refills Explained
Feel free to skip over this if you already know the deal. For all others, read on. Suppose you were to go into a quick-service food establishment place (commonly called a diner) with the express or implied intent of sitting down and staying. After taking a seat, an exchange like the following occurs.
"Black coffee please." you say.
"Sure thing, I'll be right back." comes the reply.
The employee, whose job title is (waiter | waitress | server) brings you a heavy ceramic cup filled with coffee. It sits atop a saucer, and is accompanied by a spoon. The following items are within reach:
Packets of sugar or a diner-style sugar pourer with a stainless steel lid and a trap door opening
Sweet-n-low and/or Splenda
Pre-packaged liquid creamer, or a container of half and half. If you're in a Northern European themed breakfast or brunch place that does refills ironically, you may receive actual heavy cream. This type of place doesn't count as a diner.
It may be the case that he/she also sets down an entire pitcher (!) of additional coffee on your table. If that is the case, you are likely at a Greek-owned diner with a fanciful name like the Golden Nugget. Now, suppose 10 minutes go by, and your coffee is running low - below half. In the case of the pitcher scenario, we'll say it's empty. That's when you catch the attention of the waitress, and say...
"Could I get a refill?" or... "Could you top this off?" or... "Could you give me a little more coffee?"
And the person will go away and return with a pot of coffee in hand. If you ordered decaf, the coffee pot will have an orange spout. The employee will pour additional coffee directly into your cup. In the case of the pitcher, you will also receive a fresh pitcher of coffee (I know how crazy this sounds). This process is recursive, and can repeat with no limit (theoretically). When it's time to pay, you will be charged for 1 cup of coffee. That is how it works.
How we moved away from Coffee Refills
Two mutually reinforcing factors
Gentrification - driven by real estate prices that are TOTALLY off the rails
Artisanal Everything - The leveling up of blue collar domains of expertise at the hands of the well-educated, well-off, and well-insulated beneficiaries of gentrification
1. Gentrification
First, let me say this: I love some of the effects of "gentrification": better grocery stores and restaurants, lower crime, interesting and good looking neighbors, etc. But I'm not convinced its side effects can be controlled without serious intervention, both subtle and flagrant. Here in New York City for example, consider 2 sets of homeowners on the same block in Brooklyn, who own identically sized houses.
Bob
Bob is an architect, and has a net worth of $5 million. He went to Yale, worries about climate change, drives a Tesla, and has a really badass instagram feed of great ramen joints. He paid $1 million cash for his house, then did a 1 year gut renovation of it that cost $3 million. As he was doing the renovation, he rented out a small one bedroom apartment in Dumbo for $6,000 a month.
Darryl
Darryl lives across the street from Bob. He owns his house because his grandparents bought it for $80,000 back in the 1970's. He works part time at a carwash, and makes a few extra bucks here and there doing housework for some of the older people in the neighborhood. Darryl couldn't scrape together $1,000 cash on a good day. He never went to college, rides the bus and subway, and recently had to call the cable company with a fake name to order new service because he couldn't pay for his existing service (which was shut off).
Now consider what kinds of businesses are opening up in Bob and Darryl's neighborhood. There's a restaurant serving southern cuisine with artisanally sourced produce at $25 - $40 an entree, a high-end pet food and pet toy store, a newly expanded wine store featuring an eclectic selection of reds from Eastern Europe and Portugal, a cafe that also sells flower arrangements from $25 - $175, a bakery with $7 tiramisu and $4 baguettes, a hip Japanese taco place with $27 poke bowls and tiny kale salads served in mostly recycled cups for $8. There are lots of great new places for Bob. Not so much for Darryl. Nobody is busting down the door of the bank to try and get a business loan to open a 99 cent store that sells light bulbs and cheap plastic toys for kids. Bob and Darryl nominally live in the same neighborhood, but their lived realities share no points of intersection.
2. Artisanal Everything
Certain places (like Brooklyn) have high concentrations of Bob-like people. The fact that there exists a moral conundrum of being a person of vast means while living next door to people barely scraping by is correctly recognized as an incredible business opportunity. And this state of affairs is a necessary precondition of artisanal everything. In a nutshell, the reasoning works like this...
Economies of scale & globalization have resulted in huge wealth inequality - which is bad
Long ago, way before globalization, the world was simpler and artisans made everything
Artisans, though less efficient than machines, make things slowly, skillfully, and with dedication to their craft
Things made by artisans result in higher levels of satisfaction for the buyers of such things
Artisans lack advanced education, but produce works that give life savour - like the salty people the bible mentions in Matthew 5:13
I don't want to read the bible or be an unskilled low wage worker, but I want to support artisans
Every person curates a personal narrative; a story they tell and retell (in their head), which in effect says this is who I am. It's an inescapable compulsory feature of being a storytelling animal. A central dilemma of Bob's narrative is that he enjoys the status and power his six figure salary and stock options confer, but doesn't want to see himself as a gentrifier. And he wants Darryl to see him as a person who works hard; who relishes and savors life just as deeply as he does; as a person who happens to be fortunate enough to enjoy material success, but isn't at all eager to flaunt it. Bob believes that grandstanding your wealth is tacky. Over the course of growing up, becoming educated, and socialized by his professional reference group, Bob has shaped a philosophy of consumption that favors quality over quantity, with the bonus caveat that objects and experiences that pay homage to the pious and hardworking should be sought out precisely because these people are the polar opposite of the tacky bourgeoisie that Darryl would surely despise. This narrative is what helps drive Bob into the bosom of artisanal everything: cheese, pencils, wine, towels, ceramics, etc. His consumer choices reflect his internal desire to appropriate a sense of honesty, goodness, simplicity, and hard work for himself - virtues that college-educated Americans of the late 20th century and oughts (like Bob) associate with people possessing high levels of piety and/or low levels of education (like Darryl).
Artisanal everything is diabolically successful because it has a purifying effect on Bob's purchases, and permits him to believe he's showing empathy for and solidarity with people like Darryl - so long as he is fully committed to consuming things that reflect a simple, honest, and authentic lifestyle. That is the linchpin in the narrative of artisanal everything. Bob will go to great lengths to seek out and buy only the best most authentic artisanal objects and experiences made by the zaniest people possessing the most improbable combinations of skills. The products and services of such people act as receptacles of goodness and humility that are transferrable to Bob precisely because he has done the leg work of seeking them out and interpreting the symbolism of it all.
A real world example: The Donut
Totally lowbrow, like it was intended since day 1.
Donuts are just fried dough and sugar; a staple food for cops, teachers, firefighters, and all manner of people hailing from blue collar backgrounds. They are customarily handed to you in a greasy bag through a small drive-thru window, and are widely understood as lowbrow. They're easy to make, and cheap.
But let's suppose one day, an enterprising young chef from the French Laundry decides to take a second look at this maligned comfort food. He hires a 19 year old instagrammer to photo-chronicle a donut rediscovery "exploration" during the chef's 3 month sabbatical in Oakland while renting a $5,000 a month loft equipped with a badass industrial kitchen and amazing lighting. The place is crammed with whiteboards, chalk boards, dry erasers, post-it's, at all times kicking off a strong vibe of a Manhattan project style endeavor that is definitely not for the faint of heart. The chef plows through gigantic amounts of caffeine and tobacco. Scraps of paper litter the kitchen floor, ash trays in window sills overflow, husks of broken ball point pens (yes, real ball point pens) are flung around, a giant Hobart mixer lies tipped over, sauté pans are piled up in the sink. Every day there is a delightfully staged series of vignettes posted to the instagram feed that give us glimpses into the creative pandemonium of this wacky project. Occasionally, there are even short vines that are uploaded to entice us further by giving us more awareness of the insides of the stupendous loft.
As time goes on, the instagram photos begin to show signs of refinement. Toward the end of the sabbatical, the final reveal: pure f***ing magic that the originators of donuts could not have possibly dreamt up back in the day before sous vide, flash freezing, and anti-griddles -- made possible, we learn via twitter, with a recipe the chef gleaned while visiting his grandparents in the Czech Republic. The grandparents were circus cooks during World War II who smuggled secrets into and out of Prague for British Intelligence on the inside of donuts. Not only that, we also discover that on a hilltop just outside the city, grows an ancient varietal of wheat, planted by Franciscan monks in the 14th century who were the very first Europeans to have played a game that scholars now believe was a medieval version of kickball. The chef of course, gets permission to bring samples of the wheat back to the states, and spends a small fortune to painstakingly reproduce a 700 year old flour mill from a set of drawings that serendipitously fell into his lap while he was doing a spirit cleanse inside of a yurt at Burning Man, and well... you get the rest.
General Features of the Artisanal Parable
Here's how it works, 1-2-3 style:
Take any food item that is primarily associated with blue collar people and...
If it's ethnic, even better and...
Has not been altered in any way for decades or centuries by its blue collar originators and...
Introduce that food to someone with a formal culinary pedigree that is unimpeachable and...
Allow that person to inject their expertise on to the already-delicious blue collar food and...
Ensure that the modifications are rooted in an even more authentic version of the food that can be corroborated by a compelling story that reminds rich people of 1 or more academy award nominated movies and...
Use only the most expensive ingredients/cooking equipment and...
Convince rich people (like Bob) to interpret the new version of this food as a "best of old meets best of new" enterprise - wrapping it in the flowery artisanal language of spare no expense craftsmanship and...
Reinforce the narrative by packaging the food item or some element of the experience with flourishes like twine, a hand-written note, roughly cut paper, or a well-placed conspicuous employee who looks like he/she sleeps in a homeless shelter and...
Throttle the output of the food output, or force people to wait a long time to get it so that there is the unshakeable perception that they are being patient for a very good reason and...
Increase the price of the food item by 5000%
Examples
Cocktails prepared by people with the honorific title of mixologist who eagerly tell you the 5 minute story about the vintage ice cube machine in use at the bar
Coffee that takes several minutes to make
Ham that is sliced by a non-electric meat slicer
Bone marrow harvested from cows in Vermont
Ice Cream made by Brooklynites with masters degrees in fine arts
How this killed the Coffee Refill
Places like Manhattan, Brooklyn, Portland, Seattle, LA, San Francisco, Oakland, and Williamsburg (aka: the Oakland of Brooklyn) have extremely high concentrations of Bob-types. In New York City, the current price/square foot of commercial real estate precludes you from opening up a business with low margins. This alone is a gigantic factor in killing the concept of the refill. But beyond this, people who rent 1 bedroom apartments for $2,500/month (on the low end) don't want to drink coffee that was brewed by the gallon. They want a cup that is custom made by a craftsman, just for them. They want a singular experience -- a teeny tiny consumable version of a bespoke suit.
If you go into any Blue Bottle, you will easily find a cup of coffee that costs $13. You can get one for maybe as low as $6, but that is the low low end of their price point. And when you walk into the place, it looks surgical and precise -- like they're about to split god damn subatomic particles. The real reason that the refill is nearly dead isn't just about real estate - it's about the high satisfaction threshold that seems to have taken hold of a lot of people. Not everyone (I'm talking to you, nascar watching lover of Wesley Snipes movies).
It's impossible to explain the death of the coffee refill without first explaining how globalization, interest rates, real estate prices, gentrification, and artisanal everything are entangled - kind of like Richard Feynman's major beef with trying to concisely explain how magnets work. But if you wanted to create a line up of likely coffee refill murder suspects, just go looking for all the Bobs.
Two Bobs.